That afternoon, I tried to understand if I had made a choice about what to write. But instead it seemed to me if anyone had made a choice, the novel … - Alexander Chee

I have been reading about the Neutron Bomb. I want to be like that, radiant and deadly, a ghost of an impact, to pass through walls, to kill everyone, in flight among the empty houses, punching through molecules like a knife through a paper bag.

The word for her in Paris, a courtesan who had made it to the stage, was grue — it happened so often there was a word for it.

The storm is a glazier. Then fog passes through, touches the cold trees to add to the ice already there. Here the wind spins glass from the water it has stolen off the sea and the lakes, off the hair on my head and the breath out of my mouth, the storm takes the water from us all everywhere, to make of a mountain range a stained-glass depiction of a saint no one knows.